The growth and adoption of advanced standards for wireless communication continues to drive the growth of applications (e.g., voice, video, social networking, email, etc.) as well as other data-intensive services. Wireless network operators (hereinafter “operators”) seeking to maximize the revenue generating opportunities available by offering such applications require greater flexibility in the provisioning of their access networks. For example, certain applications may be more heavily accessed by users during events (e.g., a social networking application during a football game) or in certain locations (e.g., an email application at business offices). However, current load balancing schemes do not allow operators to provision application-specific load balancing policies in their wireless access networks. Lack of such provisioning capabilities prevents existing load balancing schemes from allocating capacity to particular applications.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach to load balancing that allows operators to allocate and manage application-specific capacity in wireless access networks.